Germany is a terrible comparison here. Home ownership in Germany is about 50%, true, much lower than the US' 65%. However, the majority of those rentals are apartments rather than houses, since even small towns are highly densified, very unlike the USA. There are many state landlords which provide rentals at a very attractive price; it's rare for people to spend more than 30% of their post-tax income on rent. Furthermore, there are extremely strong protections for renters, restrictions on rent increases, and they can renovate their apartments as they please. That's very different from what American real estate corporations want.

Really is that how Germany is? And all this bullshit about inflation it is called Corporate Greed and we need to be singing it to rafters. Fucking greedy corporations making record profits while wages stagnate.

All raising rates do is continue to make it impossible for average American to own a home.

Interesting, I didn't know that about Germany. I'll have to look into how that is working out for them, seeing as probably quite a lot of people my age and younger won't be able to afford to buy.

Worse. The US is building suburbs.

Right, these people are so quick to "well akshually" they completely ignore the inflated house costs since which layers more unaffordability on top of already unaffordability.

150k at 12% is $1543/mo; in 2023 dollars, that’s $3609/mo. 1.2M at 7% is $7984/mo.

Over the same time period, the S&P500 has gone up by a factor of 13.6x - if you invested $150k in 1990 you’d have $2.04M today.

I’m not trying to make a point - I just thought this was interesting.

There's only a handful of areas where that level of appreciation happened. There's about as many places that 150k house is the same or less because it's a crime ridden neighborhood now, or there's no economic activity in the area anymore. The average is more like 2-3x increase in the last 30 years.

The opposite is happening. Everyone with a 2-4ish% mortgage is holding onto it for dear life so supply is super low which is causing housing prices to continue to climb. Can't blame those homeowners. Even if you sell your house for some inflated amount, you need to buy too and then you're stuck with a shifty mortgage rate.