re: Can someone help me explain how people are affording a house in today's market?

has a house ever been "affordable"

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If you aren't hustling to make $$ on the side, then you'll forever be in that 2,000 sqft house.

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Imagine being so out of touch that you think a 2000 sq ft home is some kind of failure

I’d like a 1200 sq ft home personally

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Imagine being so out of touch that you think a 2000 sq ft home is some kind of failure

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That's a decent sized house imo. Our next one will intentionally be smaller than that.

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Renting is cheaper and has less hassle than being a homeowner.

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Before I bought my house in 2014, my rent was $959/month. My house was double the sqft and mortgage just $100 more a month (including homeowners insurance). Also, define hassle. Dealing with landlords every year, maintenance people coming into your unit whenever they want, loud neighbors next door, is a hassle to me.

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2 income families becoming the norm is one thing that caused prices to rise so much. When I was a kid almost none of the moms in my neighborhood worked. I don't recall any kids going to daycare

We lived in smaller houses too though. My family of 5 lived in a 1600 sq ft house. My sisters shared a bedroom. We were solidly middle class

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Yep, at one time a dual income home gave you a financial leg up (but came with the sacrifice of sending children to daycare), but now it's become the norm and you'll have high income families that pay $5k/month/kid to attend primo daycare center.

There's also no community aspect anymore where you're likely to bring the kids and/or neighborhood kids together for anything. Everyone has their own little program for Johnny to become a little Einstein genius. Its what we get for allowing our society to become so atomized. We don't pursue goals connected to communities we just have personal goals and the people we end up around is purely incidental.

This sums up current America right now:

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Alexis de Tocqueville said it best almost two hundred years ago:


I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate.


That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits. After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.

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your fatther is Al Bundy?

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I mean it’s impacting me. Big time. I know it has to be impacting most people severely more than they are admitting

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You need to be a top 10%'er to buy a Chevy Tahoe or a XLT truck

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According to Quicken Loans, a good general guideline for mortgage payments is the often-referenced 28% rule which says that you shouldn’t spend more than that percentage of your monthly gross income on your mortgage payment, including property taxes and insurance.

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I feel like all these different rules (or guidelines) can be a bit dumb, they’re going to make some people feel more comfortable when they can still be stretched hitting their numbers. We decided against a house that by this metric, put us at ~23%, but when really looking at our budget and what we try to put away into savings, etc., even that was pushing it.