A $1 million starter home is now the norm in more than 200 US cities | CNN Business
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The number of US cities where first-time homebuyers are faced with at least a $1 million price tag on the average entry-level home has nearly tripled in the past five years, according to new research.

The number of US cities where first-time homebuyers are faced with at least a $1 million price tag on the average entry-level home has nearly tripled in the past five years, according to new research.

A Thursday report from Zillow indicates that a typical starter home is now worth $1 million or more in 237 cities, up from 84 cities in 2019, underscoring America’s ongoing home affordability crisis.

“Affordability has been strained across the board,” Orphe Divounguy, a senior economist at Zillow, said. “We see the largest number of million-dollar starter homes in expensive coastal markets. We see them in markets with very low homeownership rates and we see them in markets with more building regulations.”

  • PugJesus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    411·
    3 months ago

    20 years ago, my mother bought a house for just under 50k. Houses in my hometown, of the same rough location and type, now go for 4x that.

    Insane that housing prices have outpaced inflation by such a ludicrous degree. It’s almost like the system is broken, the ultra-rich and corporations have found all the good tricks and loopholes and are exploiting them to the detriment of both ordinary citizens and the nation as a whole. Thonking

    • assaultpotato@sh.itjust.works
      119·
      3 months ago

      I cannot recommend the book “Escaping the Housing Trap” highly enough. It talks a lot about the funding and financial products around housing and some of the fundamental flaws in the system. It’s quite easy to blame institutional owners and they’re certainly partly at fault, but it’s vastly more complex than that. It’s a really great scary read that genuinely had my mouth hanging open at times.

    • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
      312·
      3 months ago

      20 years is enough to double twice which would be 4x the price. That is how appreciating assets work.

      • ECB@feddit.org
        82·
        3 months ago

        Housing shouldn’t be an (in real-terms) appreciating asset. In the long run that just leads to feudalism.

        Imagine if everything keeps appreciating for 200 years… now only cyborg Elon musk can afford to buy a house.

          • tamal3@lemmy.world
            3·
            3 months ago

            Try this: when you first started working, what were people with 20 years of experience making in your industry? How does that compare to what you make with the same 20 years of experience now?

            My income has not doubled in the 10 years I’ve been working full time. But, more importantly, the amount of money people with 10 years of experience were making when I first started is not drastically different from what I am making with the same experience now.