Average home prices in New Zealand reaches 8.8 times average household income
Where I live (southern Germany), you cannot find a house under 600,000 EUR. The average net household income in Germany is around 43,000 EUR. That means that house prices here are over 16 times the average household income. Yupp, it&#x27;s bad.<p>My wife and I both have university degrees, we have good and secure jobs, and our net household income is above average. But we have generally accepted the fact that it is impossible for us to fully own a house before we are dead here, even with the national or state-wide support programs for families (we would not get much, if any, support because our income is too large). Our parents don&#x27;t quite get this. When my parents were our age in the early 90ies, my mother was a homekeeper and my father worked as a carpenter at a small company with a completely average salary. Yet it was no problem for them to build a fairly large house in a very nice neighorbood, without any financial support from their families. I remember we didn&#x27;t go on vacation for 2 years in the late 90ies &quot;because we now have to pay off the mortgage&quot;, but that was it. Their house is today worth so much (&gt; 1,000,000) that it would be <i>impossible</i> for us to find a bank willing to lend us the money to buy it.<p>We currently rent a 4 room apartment, but lived in a 2-room apartment with our daughter for 2 years before because we couldn&#x27;t find an apartment in a 30 km radius around our home town. The problem was not money - there was simply nothing available. For our current apartment, we were one of around 500 families that were initially interested, and one of 50 families who made it through the various hoops and obstacles created by the estate agent to get that number down to something managable. This is completely standard here. We only got the apartment because we were lucky.<p>At the same time, we are now starting a legal battle with our local district for a kindergarten place for our 3 year old daughter, which she is very clearly entitled to by law and for which we applied years ago. But their are no free places anywhere, and nobody in our local town seems to care anymore. Our local mayor basically said &quot;well, sue the district&quot;. The people in charge at our town hall also regularly quit. The previous person, who has now also left, told us she cannot bear parents in tears anymore who scream and yell at her because they have to both work full-time to pay of massive mortgages, and don&#x27;t know what to do with their children. Again, this is something our parents cannot even remotely understand, because the situation was <i>completely</i> different 30 years ago, when it was absolutely standard for a child to enter kindergarten when it was 3 years old. You just went to the town, asked for a place, and one was assigned to you.<p>The situation for families here has become so bad that we are seriously considering leaving the country.