Baby boomers weren't handed houses. It was impossible to land a mortgage without a large down payment in their day, and in the 1980s mortgage interest was in the teens and twenties percentage. Home owners had to have bank or inheritance, period.
I'm Gen-X, the first gen to have the ladder pulled up in front of our faces by the booms, while they left us unsupervised for days/weeks to make do for ourselves, but it wasn't all ice cream and rainbows in America, ever.
Gloss over the down payment and excellent credit requirements, eh? Of course everything's more expensive -- ain't four decades of Reagonomics just the bomb-diggity?
I loathe this talking point because it assumes that EVERYONE qualified for all of this available credit or that they had to the dough to just put down..
When in fact, most didn't qualify. As I stated elsewhere in this post, the ECOA Act was only passed a few years early in 1974 and even that took a minute to get instituted, become an accepted practice and the like.
Math is hard for folks when they are passionate about a subject and they seem to think omitting important key factors is the way to have this conversation.
I mean, obviously housing has gotten significantly more expensive, but the rates absolutely do matter. High interest rates tamp down housing prices, and we've already seen significant housing price drops in most census regions except the midwest. When rates are high, people can't afford expensive houses, so buyers dry up and sellers need to drop their prices to compensate, if they don't want to sit on the market.
It all boils down to your monthly mortgage. If the rate is 12.5% but the house is 75k you’re still paying considerably less than the current day scenario of 7.5% and 450k. Wages have not gone up in parallel.
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u/TheModWhoShaggedMe 21h ago edited 20h ago
Baby boomers weren't handed houses. It was impossible to land a mortgage without a large down payment in their day, and in the 1980s mortgage interest was in the teens and twenties percentage. Home owners had to have bank or inheritance, period.
I'm Gen-X, the first gen to have the ladder pulled up in front of our faces by the booms, while they left us unsupervised for days/weeks to make do for ourselves, but it wasn't all ice cream and rainbows in America, ever.