Maybe Americans aren't dumb enough to keep buying houses?
I'm glad I bought a house, because paying $1,100/mo (including tax and insurance) for a 3,000sqft home with a yard where I can mostly do what I want and have control over my living environment and get a tax break on about half of that monthly payment sure beats the $1,200/mo I was paying for a 1,000sqft apartment in which I had been robbed of $30,000 during a home invasion where the person had a key (maintenance crew, surely, who had access to the keys) and let themselves in while I was sleeping.<p>The rent/own ratio may be different in San Francisco (where I've lived) and New York, but there's a lot of other country out there that exists besides those two and Seattle. There's Portland, Denver, Chicago. Plenty of places. I live in a fairly expensive city (on par with Portland, where I lived most of my life). Still, my house didn't cost a lot more than the mount I'd already paid in rent during my adult life. I did the math and I have paid about $170,000 in rent. That includes apartments I've lived in in Portland, San Francisco and Denver since 1999 and is not adjusted for inflation. It includes the 400sqft hellhole in San Jose that I paid $1,200/mo for in 2000 and the 400sqft studio and 585 sqft 1bdrm in Portland, and the 1,000sqft 2 bdrm in Denver. The house I bought last year was only $25,000 more than that. Even if my home loses a ton of value (and it probably has and will), at least at the end of paying $200k into it, I'll have something worth <i>something</i>, versus what I have after about thirteen years of renting for $170,000 . . . which is <i>nothing</i>.<p>The real problem with the home market is that it's being artificially buoyed, to keep current home owners happy at the expense of houses dropping even more in price, so someone can reasonably eventually buy a home even if they're making an average income. After all, isn't that how the market is supposed to work? Stuff drops in price, other people get an opportunity to own that stuff who previously may have been priced out of participation.<p>Also, the article states that someone who just bought a house and lost 10% due to decrease in value plus commissions when selling is unlikely to enter the market again any time soon. Well, why are you buying a house just to sell it a few years later?<p>I bought my house so I could live in it. I would like it to increase in value, eventually, too. I'm not counting on it, but it would be nice. If it doesn't, at least I have a home to live in and will eventually own it (because I didn't buy the maximum house that my credit score and loanability would have allowed).<p>I don't know a lot about the housing market and I'm not an economist, but I do know that I'm glad I bought a house last year (with a rate under 5%) and wish I would have done so many years ago, instead of putting it off for a decade. (On the other hand, if I had done it a decade earlier, I probably would have taken a big hit over the last few years, so whatever).<p>Also, the other nice thing is that I'll be paying the same amount (except for tax changes) for the next 15-30 years that it takes me to pay off the house. In my apartment, I'd gone from paying $900 to $1,200/mo in only four years for the same unit. Oh, and I don't have people stomping on the floor above me 24x7, so I can't sleep. And I don't have to allow someone from the maintenance/leasing office come into my home nearly any time they want with a 24hr notice. And I can (and did) run ethernet in the walls. And I can (and did) setup my home theater and run it at 50% power instead of having neighbors complain when I ran it at 5%, before. And when I have a guest that stays for more than three days per year, total, I don't have to register them with the leasing office. And I know my neighbors and they have lived here for a couple decades and are friendly and helpful. I never even <i>saw</i> the neighbors at my apartment.<p>So, yeah. I guess I'm dumb enough.